Joseph Remnant, artist on Harvey Pekar’s CLEVELAND, channels a bit of that Pekar vibe along with writer Jeff Newelt in this online comics about jazz musician Paul Shapiro, whose new album VERSES , is out featuring famed guitarist Marc Ribot. It’s on John Zorn’s TZADIK label, so if you like Masala, you might like this.

“An Evening with Dean Haspiel”, held at the Cinema Arts Center, in Huntington Long Island on October 4th, was as much a tour of the last twenty years of comics history as a look at Haspiel’s long and varied career thus far. His immense oeuvre presented plenty of fodder for discussion, as well as the […]

Remember that Harvey Pekar Memorial Statue that was Kickstarted and planned to be installed in the Cleveland Public Library? Well, i’s going to be dedicated in just a few weeks, on October 14th. In the meantime, here’s a short film on the making of the statue, starring Pekar’s widow and collaborator Joyce Brabner.

The late Harvey Pekar left behind several projects in various stages of composition, but none was as close to him as CLEVELAND, a love letter and social history of the city that was his muse—an everyman town of ordinary people and the mundane swirl of life that is nonetheless extraordinary. For Cleveland, Pekar’s script found an artist among the greatest of his collaborators: Joseph Remnant, whose dense cross hatched naturalism recalls Crumb (who we meet in these pages) but finds its own voice with expansive staging and research.

It’s been a year since comics writing legend Harvey Pekar passed away at the age of 70, but thanks to the amount of work he had in the pipeline, not only has his legacy lived on, but it’s still growing. And friends are remembering.

Political commentary blog Scholars and Rogues is running a series of artistic tributes to the late Harvey Pekar by such folks as Kenny Be (Westword), A.N. Cargo (S&R), Derf (The City), Benjamin Frisch (Wonkette), Karl Christian Krumpholz (Byron), Mike Keefe (Denver Post), Peter Kuper (MAD), Zina Saunders (Overlooked New York) and Aaron Williams (Nodwick). A new piece will be posted each Monday through the end of the year. Above art by Karl Christian.

When Harvey Pekar died on July 12th, he was revealed in death to be a figure more influential and revered than he would ever have dared hope in life. He left a literary legacy as well as a wealth of projects in the pipeline. And he also left some awkwardness, as Dave Itzkoff in the […]

It would have pleased Harvey Pekar, I think, that his passing yesterday was noted in every media outlet from the New Yorker to EW, and not just because they made a movie about him, but as a literary figure of worth and stature. Harvey’s life’s work was in showing that the ordinary was important, and a working class existence was not a prison but a journey through the profound and beautiful that anyone could experience if they took the time. He found that beauty in simple, quotidian things and experiences that others might have found trivial or mundane, but in the end his message was that what else is there? Life as it is lived is the most precious gift of all.